Craftsmanship in Teaching eBook

IV

But perhaps you would maintain that this statement
of the case, while in general true, does not help
us out in practice. After all, how are we to
impress pupils with this ideal of persistence and with
these ideals of getting and applying information,
and with this ideal of investigation? I maintain
that these important useful ideals may be effectively
impressed almost from the very outset of school life.
The teaching of every subject affords innumerable
opportunities to force home their lessons. In
fact, it must be a very gradual process—­a
process in which the concrete instances are numerous
and rich and impressive. From these concrete
instances, the general truth may in time emerge.
Certainly the chances that it will emerge are greatly
multiplied if we ourselves recognize its worth and
importance, and lead our pupils to see in each concrete
case the operation of the general principle. After
all, the chief reason why so much of our education
miscarries, why so few pupils gain the strength and
the power that we expect all to gain, lies in the
inability of the average individual to draw a general
conclusion from concrete cases—­to see the
general in the particular. We have insisted so
strenuously upon concrete instruction that we have
perhaps failed also to insist that fact without law
is blind, and that observation without induction is
stupidity gone to seed.

Let me give a concrete instance of what I mean.
Not long ago, I visited an eighth-grade class during
a geography period. It was at the time when the
discovery of the Pole had just set the whole civilized
world by the ears, and the teacher was doing something
that many good teachers do on occasions of this sort:
she was turning the vivid interest of the moment to
educative purposes. The pupils had read Peary’s
account of his trip and they were discussing its details
in class. Now that exercise was vastly more than
an interesting information lesson, for Peary’s
achievement became, under the skillful touch of that
teacher, a type of all human achievement. I wish
that I could reproduce that lesson for you—­how
vividly she pictured the situation that confronted
the explorer,—­the bitter cold, the shifting
ice, the treacherous open leads, the lack of game
or other sources of food supply, the long marches
on scant rations, the short hours and the uncomfortable
conditions of sleep; and how from these that fundamental
lesson of pluck and endurance and courage came forth
naturally without preaching the moral or indulging
in sentimental “goody-goodyism.” And
then the other and equally important part of the lesson,—­how
pluck and courage in themselves could never have solved
the problem; how knowledge was essential, and how
that knowledge had been gained: some of it from
the experience of early explorers,—­how
to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that
could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes;